So, here’s the thing. My work on Unity and Poulsbo is entirely voluntary: these are after-school projects. Here’s the other thing: I have a pretty hit-and-miss west coast work ethic. Sometimes you’ll find me working 80-hour weeks on things that really aren’t that important, but at other times, you know, not.

Right now is more ‘not’. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time lately on house cleaning, organizing some personal events, and falling down hills, and have had little time or inclination for doing much with Unity / Poulsbo. Unity is still stuck on this bug that the upstream maintainer promised to look at after Christmas (I last submitted a requested change on Jan 25 and it’s been crickets since), but if I had the inclination I could have set up a side repo to carry on building stuff, or bugged ajax to include the patch anyway. I just haven’t. It happens. No guarantees, don’t rely on me too much. =)

Poulsbo, well, I’m just getting tired of that crap. I kinda expected _some_ upstream movement on it by now, but no, me and a few other hapless souls for the other distros are still trying to patch up ancient crap code to work with modern kernels and X. I haven’t checked if it’s working in F15. It probably isn’t. I’m not sure if I’ll bother finding the time to fix it, frankly. I don’t use my Poulsbo system much any more. I’ll see what I can do, but again, no promises.

If anyone wants to help out with either of those things, please let me know and I’ll find a way to cut you in. But just so everyone knows where things stand, right now if I have a choice between being up a mountain and poking through years old hideous Poulsbo kernel module code…I’m gonna be up the mountain. This goes for most of my extra-curricular stuff, Meego, Sugar, what have you, so I owe a few people things along those lines, I’m seriously slacking on that stuff, and I’m sorry. I may become more diligent again in a bit, or I may just go straight into summer slack-off mode (golf instead of hill-falling) and not become diligent at all. I guess you’ll find out!

Of course, there’s a lot more stuff that’s more important that Red Hat is actually dumb enough to pay me to do, and that stuff gets done. Mostly. Only a few days late. =)

Tomorrow we have the Test Day for FreeIPA v2. Cards on the table, I know precious little about FreeIPA, but I can copy and paste a description from a Wiki page, and that description is “FreeIPA is an integrated security information management solution combining Linux, 389 Directory Server, MIT Kerberos, NTP, DNS and Dogtag Certificate server.” Mostly this is gonna be interesting to existing FreeIPA users, but the developers have certainly organized the test cases nice and cleanly so you can do some testing I think without really knowing what the heck you’re doing. So if you’re at a loose end tomorrow, come along to #fedora-test-day on Freenode and give it a shot.

On Thursday we have the Xfce Test Day, assuming we can get a vaguely working image by then. There’s a major new release of Xfce for Fedora 15, 4.8, so it’ll be important to test the new features and make sure nothing has regressed with the update. If you’re an Xfce user or just interested in Xfce or alternate desktops in general, do come along to #fedora-test-day on Freenode and help test the new Xfce out. It’ll be easy and testable almost entirely from a live image that will be provided on the page.

We are also now in the TC (test compose) stage for the Fedora 15 Alpha release; TC2 came out today and needs both desktop and installation validation testing, so do please help out with that if you have time. Those pages will provide full instructions to help out with testing. TC1 and TC2 are both known to have a few significant issues, but lots of the testing is still valuable to identify further bugs that need to be fixed for the RCs and final Alpha.

Finally, a quick on-the-horizon alert: next week, February 22 through 24, will be X.org Test Week, and this is a big one since we really need to thrash on GNOME 3 compatibility especially. So get ready to come out and contribute results for your graphics card! The pages are mostly done but the test cases need some tuning and the pages currently link to the images from the F14 events (one of which isn’t there any more), so, y’know, don’t download those. new images will go up closer to the date for the F15 event.

[…] Indeed, Unity can only live up to its full potential if some of the components already included in Linux distributions also include extensions developed for Unity. These changes are mostly needed for software for the GNOME Project and its environment, such as GTK+. The Ubuntu packages for GTK+ include the Unity extensions, but most other distributions scorn them. These problems have been growing for some time now, and a year ago they led to the end of some efforts to offer Unity for OpenSUSE and Fedora. […]